They seemed to know. The swallows began an arial ballet outside my living room window the moment I opened my laptop to mourn. Ten of them, maybe 15 acrobats, engaged in a celebration, perhaps. Maybe a tribute.

It transported me back to my grandmother’s last day. I was wheeling her along in the sunshine outside of the hospital when a brave sparrow alighted, hopping cheerfully behind us. They’re said to be heavenly messengers. Or escorts. In morning, Grandma Spilloway was gone.

Patty was a middle child, “The Quiet Beatle,” of the Bender sextet. There were cliques among us kids, matters of age and gender. Sherry and Patty and Scott and Joel. Mike and I were bookends, a decade apart. I’m the oldest. Those natural separations, combined with Patty’s quiet demeanor, left us less connected than our other siblings.

That changed four years ago, when we were both diagnosed with cancer about the same time. Patty with bladder cancer, me, esophageal cancer. We always found a way to hover conspiratorially together every holiday to encourage each other and laugh in our own secret club, thumbing our noses at death. In our texts, we talked about being in the same canoe, paddling like hell. The Defiant Ones.

It’s curious that it’s only after they’re gone that we begin to assess, to piece together the puzzle that our beloved ones were. There were clues along the way that Patricia Jan Roeszler was more than the wallflower she appeared to be.

I’ve been thinking about that since she graduated to the next dimension, replaying memories of her that appear like flickering film. She was deceptively resolute from the beginning, yet floating serenely in my memory of her in a softball uniform. In my mind, I see her chin thrust forward.

Our’s was a law-and-order supper table. The usual edicts. If you put it on your plate, you ate it. “One of these days you’re going to have to eat gopher tails,” Dad groused at even a sniff of a cuisine-inspired protest. But when we had chili, there was always a neat pile of kidney beans subversively stashed beside Patty’s bowl. Dad pretended not to notice. She was never challenged. We instinctively recognized her power.

We teased her for years about the volume of her cries as a baby. Her mouth would open, eclipse the rest of her face like a cartoon, and the legend was that when she did, firetrucks would pull up. From as far away as Hecla, S.D., even. There’s something about genetics. When my daughter India was born 23 years ago, she wailed 45 minutes straight. “Can we put her back?” I asked.

Patty never really got to be a kid. She was a teen bride and a teen mother. I was convinced a wedding at 16 was a bad idea; it felt forced — I was wrong about that — and it led to one of my greatest regrets. I didn’t go to the wedding.

Patty and Dennis were married nearly 46 years. The rest of us? Uh, five divorces, among us. To quote a long-forgot ancestor, “You don’t always know as much as you think you do.”

Mom and I went to see her the day before everyone got back. Dennis and a home hospice nurse were talking in the sun, eyes glistening, leaves gleaming. Flying things swooped through Curacao syrup and marshmallows above. All the things we miss when we’re smelling the roses.

She hadn’t been responsive for a while. Her room was too dim. I edged the curtain back a couple of inches. Darkness, your time will come. But not yet. Not today.

Mom sat on one side of the bed. I sat on the other, both of us softly stroking her arms, rubbing her shoulders. Weeping.

Occasionally, Patty groaned, trying to fight her way through the fog of dimensions and morphine. Suddenly, with a determined Herculean effort, she sat up abruptly, eyes open wider than possible, searching mine. “What’s the matter!” she asked urgently. My eyes were locked with Patty’s, but I could feel Mom watching. There was an urgency to her question, but I wanted to make sure I answered correctly. I paused for forever. “Nothing, Patty,” I said finally, so we could all breathe again. “Everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”

We let the hospice nurses have their time. The holy ones. The lead nurse told us it could be that night. Maybe a couple of days, but not much more. Her son, Chris, and his family would be there the next day, and her soul sister, Sherry. Scott and Mike.

I looked in one last time before we left. The tunnel of light from the window cast a glow on her swept-back hair, and even though cancer had ravaged her body, melted away the pounds, the light revealed reality. She was breathtakingly beautiful.

She looked like an angel.

© Tony Bender, 2024